A quick tip on picking which character will shake up a play: When the lights go up, look for someone who’s upside down.

In North Coast Rep’s “Little Women,” that’s the renegade Jo — toes pointing skyward, shoulders snugged to the parlor floor, nose buried in an inverted book. It’s a fitting pose for the fierce contrarian at the center of this story.

Jacqueline Goldfinger’s graceful adaptation of the Louisa May Alcott novel doesn’t turn the original on its head, exactly. But the playwright does take liberties with the 1868 classic for this world-premiere staging – rearranging scenes, condensing events, dispensing with plenty of late-in-the-book action.

The result is an affecting show that follows a neat one-year arc in the lives of the March family. Maybe too neat for “Little Women” devotees, who’ll note the literary annulment of a couple of marriages and the deletion of a signature scene involving a torched manuscript.

As adaptations go, this one doesn’t borrow so much as distill the rich characters and bittersweet ethos of Alcott’s sprawling novel. It’s like “Little Women” steeped into a pleasing tea, then sugared with humor and plenty of period music.

The brew could have a bit more kick to it – a more gripping sense of domestic epic to match the scale of the story’s Civil War backdrop. That’s a matter for the further tinkering that’s all but certain with this still-new work.

North Coast Rep’s production, which artistic director David Ellenstein commissioned in 2008, actually pegs unmistakably all four of the March girls from the start. Such clarity and no-nonsense economy will be familiar to those who saw Goldfinger’s elegant, NCRT-commissioned “A Christmas Carol” the past three seasons.

But it’s also easy to perceive the touch of director Kirstin Brandt, whose sense of actors as architecture and ability to coax sharp performances were on memorable display during her six years running Sledgehammer Theatre here.

All her actors seem to slide right into the shoes (and eye-catching array of dresses and suits, courtesy of costumer Mary Larson) of their characters. In that first scene, dutiful and shy Beth (Brooke Byler) perches at the piano; pretty, socially ambitious Meg (Aaryn Kopp) sits primly; insecure, sometimes insolent Amy (Maddie Shea Baldwin) fiddles with something on the floor.

As aspiring writer Jo (the character Alcott patterned partly on herself), Caroline Kinsolving projects a contemporary sense in speech and gesture that can feel out of sync with the other sisters, at least at first. (The moment when Jo says of a rich family, “Those people are as boring as snot,” doesn’t exactly detract from that sense.)

It’s likely a deliberate choice in a show that doesn’t try to disguise modern-day parallels. The Marches’ father has left Concord, Mass., for the war; the girls and their Marmie (Linda Libby) are left to deal with hardship.